You can track referrals from Facebook or Twitter in Google Analytics, but what if you want to track specific links within your social media profiles to measure their effectiveness? For example, what if I want to see how many people visit pamorama.net by clicking on my Twitter profile link? This tutorial will teach you the simple steps you need to take — and this method can be used in conjunction with any of your social profiles: Facebook, LinkedIn, or the legion of others.
1: Create a trackable link
Head over to Google’s URL Builder to create a URL that can be tracked separately in Google Analytics. Fill in the spaces as indicated in this screenshot with information about your social media profile:
2: Shorten your trackable link
Google’s URL Builder will create a very long URL, so it’s a good idea to shorten it with one of the many available online shorteners. For the example below, I used bit.ly, but any of them will do the trick:
3: Add your shortened trackable link to your social media profile
You’ve created a trackable link and shortened it — now you need to add it to the the social media profiles you want to track.
4: Track your URL in Google Analytics beginning the next day
Since you used Google’s URL Builder, the link will be tracked automatically in Google Analytics each time someone clicks on on it. You’ll be able to see your referrals by going to Google Analytics -> Traffic Sources -> Campaigns. Google Analytics takes about a day to begin reporting the referrals.
Have you used Google Analytics this way? What did you learn from the data?
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I have used it for email marketing in the mail template and that works perfectly. I missed the shortening part though, so that is something to use. Thank you for the information.
Very nice tricks, I will be using analytics to track inbound links for sure.
Best,
I would rather to know from which pages the visitors come to my website. There is a report in Google Analytics showing the domains and if you click on the domain you can see the pages. However, it does not work with some forums because it doesn't support the parameter in URL.
I would rather to know from which pages the visitors come to my website. There is a report in Google Analytics showing the domains and if you click on the domain you can see the pages. However, it does not work with some forums because it doesn’t support the parameter in URL.
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